To say that Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the world’s most recognizable artists is an understatement. In recent decades, the Mexican artist has been transformed into a pop culture icon and face of a movement critics have coined “Fridamania.” Julie Taymor’s 2002 biopic Frida, starring Salma Hayek and adapted from Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography… Read more →
In his new book Love Your Asian Body, writer Eric Wat uses oral history to tell the stories of Asian American AIDS activists who confronted the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s. His book is an important contribution to our understanding of AIDS and AIDS activism during that time, since stories… Read more →
Do you read food labels in the grocery store? Even if you don’t, you’ll want to read Xaq Frohlich’s new book From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age, out from the University of California Press. Starting in the 1930s and progressing to the present, Frohlich, Associate Professor of History of… Read more →
Most people have a small, butterfly-shaped gland in their neck sitting in front of their trachea. I am no longer one of them. Almost seven years ago I had my thyroid surgically removed along with several lymph nodes and (thankfully) all of the cancer that caused unusual swelling in the gland. Realizing that I knew… Read more →
From the first page, it’s clear that Dr. Jessica Cox’s Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain is very personal. Professor Cox, a Reader in English Literature at Brunel University in London, explains that this project came out of her own pregnancy and childbirth experiences. She doesn’t just note this in the… Read more →
We teach our children about the birds and the bees, but for some, this talk is as foreign as the metaphor. Today, as a consequence of the growing awareness, knowledge, and acceptance of the nature of sexuality, recent polls in Gallup estimate that seven percent of the United States population identifies as LGBTQ+. This statistic… Read more →
Many historians, including myself, have told the story of New York City’s Sea View Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium that operated from 1913 to 1961. But only now, with the publication of Maria Smilios’s new book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, is a crucial part of Sea View’s… Read more →
“There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But—and this is the Catholic perspective—you can’t do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means.”[1] These are the chilling words of Rev. John Ehrich, who served as the medical ethics director for the Diocese of… Read more →